Word: jamestown
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...stone and prepare to beat out his brains with clubs. But Powhatan's daughter Pocahontas intervened (see following story), and the chief embraced Smith as one of his own, giving him the honorary tribal name of Nantaquoud. He even offered Smith some nearby land. Smith instead returned to Jamestown, where his adversaries charged him with negligence in the death of two of his men killed by Indians. Smith was sentenced, again, to be hanged. Hours before he was to swing, Newport arrived up the James River with fresh settlers and supplies, intervening once more to spare Smith from the noose...
...spared by the group's commander, Captain Christopher Newport, a career privateer who had lost an arm pirating booty on the Spanish Main and reckoned the colonists would need every fighting man they had once they got to Virginia. Sure enough, two weeks after they settled at Jamestown, 200 Indians attacked. Cannon fire dispersed the war party, but the skirmish served notice that the settlers were not welcome on the rich riverside tracts Native Americans first roamed some 13,000 years before the birth of Christ...
Suddenly it wasn't only the Indians who had to deal with Smith, but also the Virginia Co. investors who funded Jamestown and were impertinent enough to expect a return. Forget it, Smith wrote his London underwriters. There was no sense digging for gold where nature had left none, he scoffed, nor would the rock-strewn James River ever guide their wind-driven square-riggers on some long-dreamed-of shortcut to China. Disenchanted investors, he concluded, were free to join him in Jamestown, where their odds of surviving were about...
Smith was the only one, too, in Jamestown's first fragile years, with the ability to impose order and direction upon the bold but uneven and quarrelsome crowd that journeyed in leaking wooden boats to the far side of the world to claw out an English beachhead. "His mixture of great white father and avenging god superbly achieved what he wanted--a food supply," wrote Barbour. With the colony's survival hanging in the balance, "other questions were academic...
...were. But the real story of their relationship is more interesting than what the rich canon of American romance literature, or even Hollywood, has made of it. Pocahontas and Smith shared a deep friendship based, at a minimum, on mutual fascination, admiration and respect. Their relationship almost certainly saved Jamestown, opening the way to British empire in America...